mobile again, first with naive pleasure in movement (and a satisfaction in the tool itself), then in an extraordinary outburst of activity which has not been sufficiently studied--the tin can tourist, the first middle-class-on-the-march in history. This search for the sun, with its effects on Florida and California, broke the established habits of the middle-class and of the middle-aged; it wrote a new ending to the life of the prudent, industrious American, it required initiative and if it ended in the rather ugly tourist camp, that was only a new beginning. The great migration of Negroes to the north followed the first World War; since then the mobility of Americans is the familiar, almost tragic, story of a civilization allowing itself to be tied almost entirely to one industry, and not providing for the security of that one. Every aspect of American life was altered by the quantity-production of motor cars; the method of production itself caused minor mass-movements, small armies of unemployed marching on key cities, small armies marching back; and the universal dependence on trucks, busses and cars, which bankrupted railroads, shifted populations away from cities, slaughtered tens of thousands annually, altered the conditions of crime and pursuit, and, in passing, made the country known to its inhabitants; moreover, the motor car which created only a small number of anti-social millionaires, made some twenty million Americans feel equal to the richest and the poorest man on the road. Mobility which in the pioneer days had created the forms of democracy came back to the new democracy of the filling station and the roadside cabin. "Everybody" had a car in America, but there was no "peoples' car"; that was left for dictators to promise--without fulfilment. The cars made in America were wasteful; they were artificially aged by "new models" and the sales pressure distracted millions of Americans from a more intelligent allocation of their incomes; these were the errors, widely remarked. That the motor car could be used--was being used--as a civilizing agent, escaped the general attention until the war threatened to put a new car into the old barn, beside the buggy which had rested there for thirty years--but might still be good for transport. In one field America seemed to lag: aviation. Because the near frontiers of Europe made aircraft essential, all European _governments_ subsidized production; the commercial possibilities were not so apparent to Americans; no way existed for doing two things--making planes in mass production, and getting millions of people to use them. The present war has anticipated normal progress in methods of production by a generation; it may start the motor car on a downward path, as the motor car dislodged the trolley and the train; but this will only happen if the aeroplane fits into the basic American pattern of machines for mobility. "_The Richest Nation on Earth_"